There is no denying that many people who got in early were able to get rich from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Some of those people started with nothing or almost nothing and became very wealthy.

Picking up small amounts of free coin from faucets, or tipping, or other such methods in the early days would have been enough to make some serious money if you had held until the highs at around $20,000.

But is it still possible to turn a little bit of free time into a sizeable BTC fortune today?

What it takes to get rich from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

Lets get the obvious out of the way from the start and move forward from there: most people who made a lot of money from Bitcoin did so because of the massive increase in value per coin. So whether or not it is possible for you depends of whether or not there could be more meteoric price rises in the future.

Some of the most bullish predictions call for BTC to hit a price of $1 million USD in the future. That is a huge figure, but despite being clearly very optimistic there is some logic behind this target and behind the idea that we are still on track to hit it despite the recent bear market.

So at current prices you would need to collect around $7000 worth of BTC (exactly 1 whole coin) to become a millionaire if these bullish predictions turn out to be true. Obviously that’s a big if, but if you are trying to start from nowhere and become rich then I’m guessing anything you might try is going to be something of a long shot.

So is it possible to gather together a whole Bitcoin at current prices just from freebies?

Joining the 21 million club for free

The 21 million club is a fun shorthand way of saying you have 1 BTC, because there can only ever be 21 million coins in total.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can get free coins and see if it is possible:

Faucets

Faucets give you a small amount of bitcoin just for visiting the site and clicking a button. A very small amount. If you had been doing this in the very early days and then saved your coins until the all time high you would have ended up very happy, but whether it is still worth it now is a different question.

One of the most popular and trustworthy sites is freebitco.in. You can currently get about 30 satoshis each claim, and make one claim per hour. If you are diligent but not totally obsessive that might give you around 360 per day (12 hours). That’s about 0.001314 BTC per year. Not much. You also get free lottery tickets and reward points and can earn interest from holding the coins in your account, so maybe you can round that up to 0.0015, but it’s still not much. If we hit $1 million then your year’s worth of clicking would be worth $1500, which isn’t bad for so little effort, but it doesn’t make you rich.

ICO air drops and bounties

The amount you get per claim varies massively, from pennies to tens or even hundreds of dollars worth. That makes it very hard to estimate how much you can get, but in my past experience you can reasonably hope to collect an average of at least $50 per month from this if you take the time to do it properly, which is $600 per year.

If we hit $1 million that would give you a little over $85k.

Of course you could also increase that by selling your ICO coins at the right time – holding onto the good ones and selling the bad ones asap. It is also worth noting that there have been much more generous airdrops in the past than the current crop I used to come up with this figure. I’ve received individual airdrops / bounties worth in the hundreds in the past, so it’s totally possible that I have significantly underestimated the amount you can get. It all depends on how these things play out in the future.

User rewards and skill games

You can also get crypto rewards from using various apps and website. Again you can find more info on this from the article I mentioned in the last section.

There are much fewer of these compared to airdrops, but you can get a surprisingly good amount from each one. For example, I recently sold a Spells of Genesis card which I got free from playing the game for just over $35 (350 BCY). Meanwhile my predictions on the STOX platform have netted me in total more than $100 worth of their own token in prizes and numerous freebies in the tens of dollars of value each from other projects over the course of a few months (although I did make a deposit which helped me bump this up).

With a little time and effort I think most people could get at least $20-30 per month from this kind of thing, and the most skilled among you with plenty of time to spare could aim for more like $100 or more. Since this article is about what’s possible, not what is probable, I’m going to use the $100 figure. That would give you $170,000 if you sold at the $1 million bitcoin level

Multiplying your freebies

Don’t forget that once you have some crypto which you have collected for free you might also increase your holdings by earning interest or trading!

The conclusion

So to answer the question in the title: I think if you start with absolutely nothing to invest and just collect freebies then you are highly unlikely to become a millionaire from Bitcoin. But it is entirely possible, if not exactly probable, that you could end up with a nice little nest egg of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars if the cryptocurrency market goes on another of its epic bull runs. I would say that would make you moderately rich at least. And even if that doesn’t happen you might just have some fun and learn a few things along the way!